Blue pill, or red? It’s both.
On doubles, Joseph Conrad, not-so ‘Strangers on a Train,’ and ‘The Matrix’
From Narcissus to Neo, stories have long explored the theme of the double.
These age-old tales come in many forms. There’s that early one about the guy entranced by a reflection in a pool, never realizing he’s looking at himself. There’s another one about a pretty fellow who does not age but his portrait does. We know the fairy tale of “mirror, mirror on the wall.” That horror story about the monstrous, murderous self that lives in the shadow of an orderly, upstanding citizen. A newer double yarn involving Mr. Anderson and his agony over choosing between diametrically opposed medication plans.
And most recently on Substack,
encountered versions of himself in his biography and in a doppelgänger-like young actor who stars in The Buddha of Suburbia, his novel turned play. Kureishi pondered, “HOW MANY PEOPLE AM I?”The illusion that we can be someone else is a compelling one. Every day, I think about who I might have been or who I someday must be. Don’t you? To ruminate on past mistakes or future escapes is to keep my double alive. And to imagine my shadow other doing better than me is the only way I know how to be whole.
Yes, I probably ponder the divided self too much, but it’s not my fault. Doubles are everywhere. In superhero stories. In secret-life documentaries. In the dissembling self-portraits your friends post online. In the pharmaceutical ads that promise a thinner me. A calmer me. A harder me. A happier me. Or just a more medicated me.
Lately, I’ve been reading about disobedient doubles: the ones that look at the rule-following self and decide to rebel.
Both literary stories I discuss below feature two distinct characters that the author frames as opposing sides of a single personality. One character embodies the civilized self, while the other represents the shadowy, anti-social self. When the two meet, the rational self plunges into a state of doubt: “Why are society’s rules so important to me? What would happen if I broke one? Is my double’s life better than mine?”
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Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer” (1909) is featured in Stories from the Double, a critical collection of four classic double stories.1 Conrad offers an introspective tale about a newly appointed sea captain who secretly brings aboard his ship a fugitive named Leggatt.
The captain hides Leggatt in his quarters and lets him tell his story.
Leggatt was the chief mate of the Sephora, a nearby ship. There was a storm. During a life-and-death struggle to set a “reefed foresail” — securing it to the ship to help everything stay afloat during perilously windy conditions — another crew member panicked. Leggatt said this crew member had a history of disobedience, “one of those creatures that are simmering all the time with a silly sort of wickedness. Miserable devils that have no business to live at all. He wouldn’t do his duty and wouldn’t let anybody else do theirs.”
Leggatt recounts their conflict. There was a decisive moment where he had to act:
“I believe the fellow himself was half crazed with funk. It was no time for gentlemanly reproof, so I turned around and fell him like an ox. He up and at me. We closed just as an awful sea made for the ship. All hands saw it coming and took to the rigging, but I had him by the throat, and went on shaking him like a rat, the men above us yelling, ‘Look out! look out!’ Then a crash as if the sky had fallen on my head. They say that for over ten minutes hardly anything was to be seen of the ship — just the three masts and a bit of the forecastle head and of the poop all awash driving a long in a smother of foam. It was a miracle that they found us, jammed together behind the forebitts. It’s clear that I meant business, because I was holding by the throat still when they picked us up. He was black in the face.”
Was this murder “justifiable homicide,” as some modern readers would term it, or did Leggatt go to far? Will witnesses to his crime have understood his act in full? Could they, who later consented to punish him, have been impartial? Didn’t they owe the murderer their very lives? Does the captain have enough information to turn the fugitive in at the next port of call, or should Leggatt, whose impulsive action against another man likely delivered the Sephora from harm, be forgiven and let go?
Prickly questions, all of which Stories of the Double’s editor Albert J. Guerard places in a philosophical context. He questioned, “Is a sympathy for the fugitive or the rebel ultimately a sympathy for one’s self? Are crime and guilt always public matters to be assessed by judge and jury? Or has the man who has committed an unintended or marginal crime — ‘the secret sharer, as though he were my second self’ — the right to determine his own punishment?”
This same crisis of conscience is at play in Patricia Highsmith’s masterful novel Strangers on a Train (1950), which was adapted for the 1951 film by Alfred Hitchcock. While the latter has rightly earned a spot on the U.S. National Film Registry, the former deserves to be preserved for its chilling take on complicity.
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The story involves two men who meet on a train and have a devilish conversation. Bruno, a trust-fund momma’s boy2, gets to talking to Guy, the unhappily married architect. Bruno doesn’t like his father, and Guy doesn’t like his wife (whom he wishes to divorce). Bruno says he’s devised the perfect way to get away with murder: have strangers, like them, trade victims. Why not do each other a favor and kill each other’s target and evade the law? No one would ever find out.
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The train trip ends, and Guy dismisses Bruno’s proposition as idle, drunken bullshit. But Bruno, over time, keeps contacting him — by phone, by letter, and in person — artfully cajoling him to just accept the deal. Guy refuses, and then one night, Bruno decides by himself to just follow Guy’s wife to a circus and strangle her in the dark.
Now it’s Guy’s turn to kill, but Guy feels trapped. He never agreed to the deal. What should he do to avoid punishment? Go to the police and rat out Bruno, who might turn on him? Should he just give in and commit Bruno’s murder? Bruno keeps the pressure on, threatening Guy’s job. Making calls to his “other woman,” Anne. Showing up outside his house at night.
Like “The Secret Sharer,” Strangers on a Train presents two main characters who are the reflections of one another: Guy, the respectable citizen who’s terrified of guilt and the law, and Bruno, his shadowy id who psychotically turns secret urges into real-life problems.
Both of them recognize the other as a completing half, but only Bruno has the fortitude to play out what this really means. Toward the end of the story, deeds done and the law on their heels, Bruno visits Guy’s Anne and gleefully shares his insights on human nature:
“I was thinking of what Guy always says, about the doubleness of everything. The know, the positive and negative, side by side. … People, feelings, everything! Double! Two people in each person. There’s also a person exactly the opposite of you, like the unseen part of you, somewhere in the world, and he waits in ambush.”
Movies used to be a more collective medium, while books remain largely individual
As to the boring question whether the book version or movie version of a story is better — they’re both good at exploring the double — I offer a passing thought about the differences between readers and viewers and how they are becoming more alike.
I used to think of novels and their movie adaptations as story-world doubles. They were two parts of a self-exploratory whole that played supporting roles for the consumer: books were more contemplative and private, while movies were more emotional and public.
That distinction is blurring.
Reading was, and still largely is, designed as a solitary experience. The reader consumes the story individually, relying, in the moment, on experience, knowledge, and reading acumen to visualize and feel what’s happening in the story. Having sympathy for the angel or devil, through reading, is a decidedly private affair.
Movies, at least at the time when the aforementioned ones were made, were created to be consumed differently than they are now.
In Hitchcock’s heyday, they were explicitly designed for theaters where they were experienced by a crowd. “The Secret Sharer” short film was designed for a classroom: a group of students that was similarly a crowd.
Until the 1980s, the consumption of motion pictures like these primarily happened publicly, among many viewers at a time. The shared gasps and laughter of the crowd did as much to shape the feeling of the story for the movie-goer as did the content of celluloid original. To express sympathy for the devil, as part of a crowd, was to do so communally. It was social, moral-building affair. A performative one, where movie-goers often learned how to feel about a story by absorbing the feelings of others.
Back in the day, that is to say, each movie-goer had a shared double that guided them in how to feel: the crowd.
Now 2024, movie-going has become, by the virtue of the growing home entertainment industry, movie-viewing. This latter is a much more solitary affair that’s not movie-going anymore — and more like reading.
The crowd is dying, and the movie-watcher isn’t aware of its crowd double like the movie-goer was before.
We used to “go to the movies,” in part, to feel what others felt in order to help us understand who we were. We now watch them at home, largely away from the live feedback of a crowd, and create our in-the-moment feelings about the story by ourselves. Making meaning from movies, increasingly since the rise of the VCR, cable, and streaming, is a lonely enterprise. Moral-building, as it pertains to the motion picture, happens more and more in private.
It’s thus unsurprising to me that the motion picture is becoming more like books: more episodic, designed for individual consumptive habits, and less beholden to the rules of a so-called mass popular culture. Movies, like books, aren’t for crowds anymore. They’re for individuals. And those individuals, I think, need a new double.
That’s where my thoughts about Neo come in.
The new double dilemma is not a choice between blue or blue
Our era’s compelling doubles seem to be less flesh-and-blood reflections of the self and more virtual ones. That’s my theory anyway.
Let’s return to The Matrix, the double story that seems to vividly reflect our expectations about what doubles should mean to us.
Our public lives are virtual ones now. Mediated by screens which feed complex, more controlled versions of ourselves. We meet and perform for strangers on the internet, not on ships or trains.
Dumbing The Matrix and the virtual public space down, Mr. Anderson faces a choice: abandon self-awareness and stay inoffensively content in the virtual crowd, or break free from it by choosing self-awareness and embracing the chaotic joy and terror that comes with being Neo, a lonely rebel with a real-world cause.
As much as I want to cheer Neo for making the right choice in taking the red pill and raging against the machines, the consequences for choosing free will within double stories are never just good or bad. They’re both.
And if you spin a double story into the future — it is essentially a quest in search of a different way forward, after all — what does choosing individuality ultimately mean? To stay free, the hero’s choice between staying put or breaking free will not happen with just one act of rebellion. The need to rebel will just keep repeating itself, again and again and again.
After The Matrix (1999), you’ll recall there were more choices for Neo to make: in The Matrix Reloaded (2003). In The Matrix Revolutions (2003). And, as
brilliantly explored in his recent post, in The Matrix Resurrections (2021). From imprisoned to free, from free to imprisoned, over and over again, the story of the double, on screen, in books, and in our heads, is one of inescapable repetition. Of persistent duality. We must choose between complacency and freedom in perpetuity if we want to remain our own heroes.![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F86599949-30d5-4da5-8630-75fcbce40e93_1146x412.png)
Fictively speaking, the double is there to remind us that choices between what feels safe and what scares us, what makes us feel trapped and what makes us feel free, what keeps us sane and what lures our minds astray, have been constants of human experience since Narcissus gazed into the pool.
You are, over and over and over again at different stages of your life, choosing to be you or your double. And you’ll need more Neo story adaptations to guide your way. Inevitably, we’re going to get a new Matrix movie, but what about a streaming series? What about a virtual reality adaptation? I assure you that Mr. Anderson and Neo, the doubles for our times, are not done adapting for us yet.
So Conrad, Highsmith, and the Wachowskis walk into a bar …
The dilemma all doubles face, if you look into their futures, is that they must keep making choices, sometimes right and other times wrong, to keep their full selves alive.
Thus, to be wholly one, you must remain two.
So, no, I don’t believe we are the red pill or the blue pill. Mr. Anderson or Neo. Guy or Bruno. The captain or Leggatt. We are destined to be both at the same time at all times, until death does us part.
What happens after that? I’m out of ideas. Ask Morpheus. He could use a double about now.
I borrow this essay’s working definition of the double from Claire Rosenfield, who wrote the afterward to Stories of the Double. She observes, “Not until Freud revealed the importance of the irrational in my have we been wiling to admit the possibility that each of us has within us a second or a shadow self dwelling beside the eminently civilized, eminently rational self, a Double who may at any time assert its anti-social tendencies.”
If you prefer your Strangers on a Train movie with even more mommy issues, see Throw Mamma from the Train (1987) starring Danny DeVito, Billy Crystal, and the inimitable Anne Ramsey. DeVito also directed.
Thanks for including my "MATRIX RESURRECTIONS" essay!